Model of Figure-Ground Cognition in Literary Text

Cognitive mechanisms and nerve systems are an important issue in the phylogeny of living organisms. Human consciousness has long been studied, with various models being developed, and the discussion still continues today. Originally generated for visual perception, gestalt psychology introduced the idea of figure and ground to describe our mechanism of attention. We have come up with a method to model such figure and ground relation. We have applied this method to model how a figure and ground relation may be applied to story characters when reading a literary work. We compared this result with a control resulting from randomly generated input matrix. The resulting graph generated from text has characteristics changes. The changes in the graph reflect a dramatic shift in character attributes. Such drama may encourage the reader to anticipate what comes next in the story.